We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Monday, August 7. 2017

Bird Dog has gone fishing for the week. His Raja Isteri figured his audience would bridle at seven full days without a little touch of Bird Dog in the night, so she kindly sent me a picture of him up to his old angling tricks. Bird Dog isn't much of a fisherman, truth be told. Just between you and me, he jacklights great whites. He even tried a salt lick once, but it didn't work all that well. I'm not sure why. Anyway, as you can see, Bird Dog is just another square old man who wears his shoes when he goes swimming.

The invention suggests employing a super tall chimney to facilitate heat exchange in the atmosphere as a remedy to Global Warming. Calculations show that if we can construct a chimney 5 kilometers (3 mile) tall and 20 meters in diameter out of flexible fabric material. Such Chimney will be sturdy enough to stand upright and withstand side winds. We will need as many 25,000 of such chimneys to stop global warming.

It had been a hectic news day. In one of the shrillest moments in
America’s infamous anti-communism “red scare,” husband and wife Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg were both found guilty of conspiracy to commit
espionage.

Apparently little-known fact to some people: The USSR is no longer operative. We've read their files. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were guilty, guilty, guilty

The report suggests new types of leadership will emerge. Rather than aiming to become a professional manager (“to take expert bricklayers, so to speak, and make them managers of other bricklayers”), top talent would shift to contribute directly to a company’s service or product and communicate directly with each other rather than through managers (they should be”guilds of bricklayers”).

Little-known fact: You can hire bad writers who shotgun quotation marks and parentheses into everything to pretend to be impartially reporting on a newsworthy trend just to get a link back to the company that hired them, because the FTC isn't paying attention to the internet. Yet

There is no such thing as EQ. Let me repeat that: "There is NO SUCH THING AS EQ." The idea was popularized by a journalist, Daniel Goleman, not a psychologist. You can't just invent a trait. You have to define it and measure it and distinguish it from other traits and use it to predict the important ways that people vary.

Little-known fact: You can't mention this at Google, either

Have a great Monday, everyone. If you can manage it, you should go fishin'.

"In one of the shrillest moments in
America’s infamous anti-communism “red scare,”

The Red Scare was under Woodrow Wilson and included the imprisoning of Socialist leader Eugene V Debs who was finally freed by President Harding. The Scare was implemented by "Palmer Raids" by Wilson AG Palmer.

Continuing on that theme, The Soviets' Venona files clearly showed that "Tailgunner" Joe McCarthy was pretty much correct in his assertions that the US government was infiltrated by Soviet agents, up to and including FDR's "co-President" Harry Hopkins!

I have often thought that the untold story about McCarthy was who was leaking these communist sympathizers/spies secrets. It's not as though McCarthy was an investigator digging this up himself. I wonder what happened to that person.

There may not be an actual EQ metric, but there has to be something like it. If you've ever been in a tough business meeting and watched one exec totally mis-read the room, and the next one read it correctly, resulting in the first exec getting blown out of the water, then you've seen it in action. Maybe it's not EQ. But it's something...

I do remember years and years ago, before global warming became a catchphrase, that similar sized chimneys were proposed for coastal area. For power generation, fresh water, and- to mitigate hurricanes. I think it was Popular Science where I read about them. One every ten miles along the California coast and Colorado River water wouldn't need to be pumped over the mountains to Los Angeles.

This pass in the AirBnB article amused me, in a Fox-Butterfield way: "Berlin, like most German cities, is experiencing an acute shortage of affordable homes. Rents are rising at a rate of nearly 10 percent a year, even though the city has a rent cap and has introduced one of the strictest bans on holiday apartments."

There are people who will never, never get that rent caps lead inexorably to living space shortages. Never, ever. They will be gobsmacked every time it happens.

As for the sniffy attitudes towards pros using AirBnB, I've used it twice, and both landlords would have benefited from a bit of professionalism. The informality is great, but they should have put more effort into cleanliness. I'm pretty flexible in that department, but sheesh. No pro would have had trouble diagnosing the problem.

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